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Three Marriage Saving Money Strategies The Pros Use

If I wanted to learn how to compete in speed skating and had the opportunity to meet Apolo Ohno or Eric Heiden, I’d blast them with questions since they both frequently stood on the medal stand. As a financial educator, I often get questions on how my husband and I manage our own money and I absolutely love it. It makes sense. Learn from the people who practice what they teach. In most situations, the important thing is not so much what they say but what they actually do. I asked my financial planner colleagues what works for them with money in their marriages so everyone can learn from them. Since money tops the list of stressors in marriage, new couples can save themselves a lot of grief by starting with a solid money foundation, and every couple can use the guidance to improve how they manage their finances.

Our experts are a diverse group – all Certified Financial Planner™ professionals with over 10 years of experience in personal finance and most have additional professional degrees including a CPA designation, a JD, MBAs and AFCs (Accredited Financial Counselor – debt and budgeting). All of us are financial experts, provide educational services such as workshops, webcasts, and one-on-one financial planning sessions, and publish articles and research on various financial topics. I picked out three of them and here is what they had to say:

Linda Robertson, CFP®, CEBS — We use the “his, mine, and ours” system.

I believe there must be a dominant spouse who handles the day-to-day finances (in my household, that’s me) and we have a checking account that is fed by my husband and me. Then I manage our joint monthly expenses. We each have our own money fund that we can spend as we like each month – this is like an allowance account with a debit card attached, separate from the primary checking. Here’s the “why” behind my system from past experience:

When my husband used to manage his own credit card payments, he would roll over balances even when we had the money to pay it off because he hated to see the money leaving our checking account. So the unseen double digit interest being charged was not a motivator for him to pay off the bill – this drove me crazy! We were paying high interest rates on credit cards when we didn’t have to. The other thing is that until I took over sole responsibility of the primary checking, checks would be taken out of the checkbook and not put in the register so I had no clue whom the checks were paid to. Of course this was a decade ago, before check writing became almost obsolete, but the point is it was a mess. The “his, mine, and ours” system works great for both of us. I really believe that with most couples, there is one spouse who has no desire or interest in managing the money or worrying about the bills, and that spouse is never going to be fully engaged with the finances no matter how many “money meetings” there are.

On the other hand, the rest of the advisors stuck by the plan of having regular meetings with their spouses to discuss their finances.

Bruce Young, CFP®, AFC — The “money meeting” is vital to success.

My wife and I have a monthly meeting where we go over our finances and talk about any upcoming expenditures and what can wait. This has become so consistent that in general the time it takes is minimal – unless we are planning a major expense such as a vacation or a repair to our fourplex. We also have a “retirement meeting” semiannually where we see how we are doing with respect to our goals and how our investments are doing. We also try and clear all personal expenses greater than $300 with each other just to make sure we continue to live below our means.

A professional hires a professional: Bruce also mentioned something many people may find surprising. Even though he is a financial expert, he and his wife are in the process of hiring a financial planner. Bruce said, “[w]e want someone to help us in some of the day-to-day financial stuff that we don’t want to slip through the cracks, but we don’t have the time for.” For example, they just recently moved from California to Illinois and found that their medical powers of attorney needed to be updated. These are the kinds of things that a local financial planner can catch that are well worth the time and money spent.

Also, if you think about it, when you spend your day talking, researching, and writing about money, the last thing you want to do at night is review your own investment statements. My husband Jay and I also have a financial planner who manages our investments and handles our life insurance. We review our own statements quarterly, and since our money is in a managed account, I don’t have to review it more often than that. Jay doesn’t have the interest and I know if left to me, I’d put it at the bottom of the list of things to do.

Being a financial planner, I found I often was tied to an idea or strategy and pushed it on my husband even when he didn’t buy into it, and when that didn’t work, I completely abandoned it. Even the best strategy in the world won’t work unless everyone involved agrees to it. I found that compromise was the answer. For example, I am very much debt averse. I don’t like debt and would be happy as a clam if I didn’t have any debt at all – except a mortgage as a necessary evil. My husband didn’t care about carrying debt – his attitude was if he could make the payment, it would be paid off some time in the future and the interest didn’t bother him a bit. The way we approached debt couldn’t have been more different.

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